ATI to Boost Efficiency of Multi-GPU Operation in OpenGL

Graphics sub-systems with numerous graphics processing units (GPUs) have existed for more than one decade and in the recent years leading developers of graphics processing units – ATI, graphics business group of Advanced Micro Devices, and Nvidia Corp. – resurrected graphics boards with two chips. So far multi-GPU operation relied mostly on drivers from ATI or Nvidia. But the recent OpenGL extension from ATI allows game developers to optimize their titles for multi-chip rendering.

There is currently no way for applications to efficiently use GPU resources in systems that contain more than one GPU. Hardware developers have provided methods that attempt to split the workload for an application among the available GPU resources, but this has proven to be rather inefficient since most applications were never written with these sorts of optimizations in mind, e.g. alternate frame rendering, split frame rendering or tiled rendering.